Course Overview

This course is a brief introduction to the elements of music theory for those with little or no music theory experience. We will explore pitch, rhythm, meter, notation, scales, keys, key signatures, meter signatures, triads, seventh chords, and basic harmony. If you listen to music or play music by ear, and you want to know more about how music is organized and notated, this course is for you.
By the end of the course, you should know all major and minor keys, how to read and write in treble and bass clef using standard meters and rhythmic values, and how to notate and harmonize a simple melody. This course can serve as a stand-alone basic music theory course, or it can be a springboard to more advanced theory and composition courses.
Your instructor is Bruce Taggart, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Michigan State University, in the College of Music, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate music theory since 1996.

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JJ

Feb 16, 2017

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Great Course, Already Told My Friend About It, I Learned So Much In So Little Time.

從本節課中

Basic Materials: Overview, Tonality, Notation

Learning Outcomes: By the end of this module, you should be able to: (1) discuss the elements of music, (2) explain the difference between tonal and atonal music, (3) sing the tonic in tonal music, (4) identify the fundamental and partials of a note, (5) explain the difference between chord and harmony, (6) explain the five-line staff, (7) read and write notes using treble and bass clefs, and (8) identify rhythmic values in notation. You should be able to (9) distinguish between pitch and pitch class, (10) describe octaves and how to label pitches based on octave placement, (11) identify and write accidentals and find them on the piano keyboard, (12) and define equal temperament (the artificial scale used on the modern piano) and tell how it differs from other tuning systems.

教學方

Bruce Taggart

Associate Professor

腳本

[MUSIC] Welcome to Getting Started with Music Theory. My name is Bruce Taggart. I teach music theory in the College of Music at Michigan State University. This class is for anyone who is interested in starting to learn the technical side of music. Maybe you play guitar and wonder how chords work and why some chords sound good and some chords sound bad when you're harmonizing a melody. Maybe you'd like to arrange songs for a vocal group you sing in or a band you play in. Maybe you're interested in composing, this course is a good place to start. Although, it helps to be able to read music, and know something about scales and chords, it's not required. I'll start with basic melody, basic harmony and basic musical notation. By the end of the course we'll be reading music in bass and treble clefs, notating rhythms in duple and triple meters, and talking about triads and seventh chords, notating them and labeling them using several different chord notation systems. The course is mostly about western tonal music, that is, the musical language that started around 600 years ago in Europe growing into our classical popular and jazz music of today. We'll look at nuts and bolts of tonal music. What makes it tonal? How do the individual notes combined into melodies, chords and harmonies? How do rhythm and meter organize music in time? How do we write it all down? And what special terminology and labels we can use to explain it all? That, after all, is what music theory is really all about. This all can sound very technical and intimidating but I'm not going to be telling you anything that your ears don't already know. If you listen to music and make music, even just singing in the shower, you understand it already, at least by sound. All music theory does is label and explain what you already are an expert in, as a listener. This course is just the beginning. From here you could go on to study more advanced music theory, you can compose and notate your own melodies and you can add harmonies to tunes you write and hear. So let's get started. [MUSIC]